SAN FRANCISCO — Sid Meier, creator of Civilization, says gamers are a bunch of head cases.

“Player psychology has nothing to do with rational thought,” said the acclaimed game designer during his keynote address at the Game Developers Conference on Friday. Titled “The Psychology of Game Design (Everything You Know Is Wrong),” the speech talked about what’s going on in a player’s brain as he plays a game, and how designers should anticipate and react to their irrational expectations.

As an example, ..read the full article

SAN FRANCISCO — For the future of Final Fantasy, director Motomu Toriyama is looking to Uncharted 2.

The interactive cinematic scenes in Naughty Dog’s critically acclaimed action game seem to have inspired Toriyama to try the same thing in the Final Fantasy games, he said at his Game Developers Conference panel on Friday. “In Final Fantasy XIII, the interactivity was focused on the battle scenes,” he said. ” I think there will be more interactivity (in future Final Fantasy cut scenes) ..read the full article

SAN FRANCISCO — Final Fantasy XIII began its life as a PlayStation 2 game. Here’s what it looked like.

Speaking at Game Developers Conference on Friday, FFXIII director Motomu Toriyama talked a bit about the development history of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game, showing the early screenshot pictured above. The battle system, Toriyama said, let players attack enemies so they slammed into a wall and collapsed — perhaps the precursor to the finished game’s “Stagger” mechanic.

“The battle system and ..read the full article

The Xbox 360 version of BioShock 2 topped the sales charts in February, moving half a million copies in a month packed with big game releases, the NPD Group said Thursday.

Boosted by BioShock, Dante’s Inferno and continued sales of Modern Warfare 2, the Xbox 360 was the best-selling home game console in the U.S. last month. On the software side, Wii hits New Super Mario Bros. and Just Dance continued to sell boatloads, and Sony’s innovative Heavy Rain had a ..read the full article

SAN FRANCISCO — “Audio is my lover,” Akira Yamaoka said as he kicked off his presentation Thursday at Game Developers Conference. Pulling out his guitar, he played some music that he composed over the past day on his trip from Tokyo to San Francisco.

Yamaoka is best known for his years at game publisher Konami, creating the music and sound for the Silent Hill horror game series. He is now working with independent developer Grasshopper Manufacture, composing music and producing sounds ..read the full article

SAN FRANCISCO — Nintendo’s Metroid games take their creative cues from an unlikely source: Dario Argento, the Italian horror film director.

At his keynote speech during the Game Developers Conference on Thursday, Metroid creator Yoshio Sakamoto said that Argento’s films Susperia and Deep Red, which he discovered in his youth, awoke his creative sensibilities. The horror films were a big influence on the innovative, stylish space adventure Metroid games, he said.

“Deep Red has the greatest inspiration on my creative process,” he ..read the full article

SAN FRANCISCO — Kumar Garg, policy analyst for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wants the game industry to address America’s “national challenges.”

In a keynote entitled “Grand Challenges for Game Developers” delivered at the Game Developers Conference on Wednesday, Garg focused on videogames’ unique ability to engage, immerse and teach.

“We don’t allow kids to fail and iterate,” Kumar Garg said of our country’s current approach towards education. Garg believes that games have much to teach educators, ..read the full article

SAN FRANCISCO — Sony’s motion controller is called PlayStation Move and will be released this fall, the gamemaker said Wednesday. Whether any killer app games will be released with it is still in question.

At a lavish press briefing taking place a few blocks away from the Game Developers Conference, Sony revealed the final name and specifications of Move, which it first showed off at last year’s E3 Expo.The controller itself is almost exactly like the Wii remote, although Sony says ..read the full article

SAN FRANCISCO — Search behemoth Google buttered up the game development community at the Game Developers Conference Wednesday by handing out free mobile phones.

At the tail end of the panel “Bring Your Games to Android” presented by Jack Palevich — the programmer who recently ported Quake to the Android platform — representatives from the company gifted a Motorola Droid to every developer who listened in on Palevich’s pitch session.

Google launched the Android operating system for mobile phones in 2008. ..read the full article

Classic videogames like Street Fighter and Ms. Pac-Man inspired the artists whose works will be displayed in the Game Over 3 exhibition.

Put on by geek magazine turned art, design and clothing purveyor Giant Robot, the group gallery show will feature pieces from dozens of illustrators, painters, cartoonists, artists and game designers.

Game Over 3 runs Friday through Sunday at the Giant Robot store, 618 Shrader St., in San Francisco, California. Check out Wired.com’s preview of ..read the full article

SAN FRANCISCO — OnLive, the streaming games-on-demand service, will launch on June 17 for $15/month, the company announced Wednesday at Game Developers Conference.

Only the PC and Mac versions of the service are launching on the 17th — the tiny box that connects to your television won’t launch until later this year. And what will that $15/month get you? Access to OnLive’s service, but no games — those will have to be purchased separately. I’d rant about this but Bill Harris ..read the full article

SAN FRANCISCO — Big-name videogame designers are thinking small.

Creators of legendary games of the ’80s and ’90s like Sinistar and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are increasingly working on social games like those found on Facebook, largely because the development of popular time-wasters like FarmVille closely mirrors the creative process that drove the early days of gaming: small teams, short production schedules and more creative autonomy for designers.

“It feels to me like 1981 or 1982,” said designer Brenda Brathwaite ..read the full article

SAN FRANCISCO — Think the music game market is already crowded enough? Here comes a new challenger, a full-band game that will use real electric guitars for controllers.

PowerGig: Rise of the SixString, published by Seven45 Studios, will be demoed on the Game Developers Conference show floor this week. It’s scheduled to be released this fall on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Wired.com got an advance look at the game and the guitar peripheral (above), which looks like a Rock Band ..read the full article

You might have heard that Square Enix recently shipped a new entry in the all-but-forgotten Lufia series of role-playing games in Japan. Or maybe you didn’t. Called Estpolis: The Land Cursed by the Gods in Japan, the game shipped in late February to little fanfare and meager sales (it didn’t even make the top 10). So it’s definitely a B-game. But it’s not bad, if you’re looking for an action RPG. A few of my scattered thoughts follow.

Although the game’s ..read the full article

It’s officially official: Valve will bring its Steam online distribution service and titles from its massive library of hit games to the Mac this April, the company confirmed Monday.

The successful content-delivery service will bring Valve titles like Left 4 Dead and the upcoming Portal 2, as well as games from other publishers, to Apple computers for the first time.

The move was telegraphed last week in a series of teaser posters that mashed characters from Valve games into retro Apple ..read the full article

Portal 2 is real, and coming this Christmas, Valve said Friday. And it looks like Mac owners might get to share the love.

The Seattle gamemaker announced that it would release the sequel to Portal, its space-time-bending, hilarious 2007 sleeper hit later this year. If you want to know more, you’ll have to pick up the next issue of Game Informer magazine. And Valve’s not done making waves: A slate of teaser images released this week that the company is ..read the full article

After much deliberation, Microsoft has changed its policy about self-identifying one’s sexual preference, race, religion or nationality via its Xbox Live online service.

In an open letter written Friday, Xbox Live general manager Marc Whitten said that the Xbox Live Terms of Use and Code of Conduct will now allow players to “more freely express their race, nationality, religion and sexual orientation in Gamertags and profiles.”

Specifically, it is now kosher to use the words “lesbian,” “gay,” “bi,” “transgender” and “straight” in ..read the full article

The most important thing to understand about Final Fantasy XIII, the latest in the world’s most popular line of role-playing games, is that it isn’t a role-playing game.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Just ask its creators: In a recent interview, the director of this PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game (available March 9) said the changes he made to this installment were so dramatic that it constituted a “new genre” outside the “RPG template.”

Various Final Fantasy ..read the full article